


(Un)Broken (Promise)

by OverMyFreckledBody



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Allusions to mental illness, Angst, Character Study, Gen, Off-screen Deaths, Pre-Canon, Sibling Bonding, expanding on canon a little, more like character dissection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-08
Updated: 2018-04-08
Packaged: 2019-04-20 00:48:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,154
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14249475
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OverMyFreckledBody/pseuds/OverMyFreckledBody
Summary: There is an alpha shift and a full wolf shift. It takes a lot to do both. Peter and Talia can do just that.But their shifts are vastly different.--A character study on Peter, as well as a dabble in wondering if one's alpha shift is influenced by their full wolf.





	(Un)Broken (Promise)

**Author's Note:**

> the things you wonder about at 2am until you write it down so you can finally fall to fucking sleep, man
> 
> and it's kinda fucked, but i was listening [to this song while writing](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dYRqIAuY9IQ)
> 
> on those mental illnesses, if you are wary in ANY way of how it could come across or be portrayed (though it's not a specified one that I have in here, though I was thinking of one in particular) -- i'd be careful. you can ALWAYS, ALWAYS exit out of a fic.

                He is sixteen. He is sixteen and wild and experiencing the world as he should.

 

                He is sixteen and he takes her out into the woods.

 

                He takes her out into the woods and looks her right in the eye when he starts, “I have been practicing.” Despite the fact that practice is not perfection in his eyes, she can neither hear nor see anything in him that shows anything short of complete confidence. “I can do it, too.”

 

                “Show me, then,” she says, her head lifting higher, chin jutting out, all in a slow, smooth motion. It’s more than practiced by now – natural. Still, it is a challenge, one that he, predictably, takes up well too.

 

                Out in the woods, she watches as he strips out of his clothes and with the barest pause between the last of his clothes falling onto the ground and the next moment – he shifts. She’s seen it done by her parents before, but watching it on Peter, her baby brother, for the first time, is new and captures every drop of her attention.

 

                He drops his human skin and while she knows that his bones are rearranging themselves, it is silent. This is how she can tell that he has practiced – the soundlessness. It is painful, making the pure shift to their inner form, especially for the first time. If he is holding back his screams and cries, then he has done this before.

 

                It’s when he stops, when he is finally done, that the silence is broken – but by her. She cannot help the inhale that rips through her nose, at realizing that he is finished transforming – not halfway stuck somewhere in between. Because that is what it looks like.

 

                He has come out of the shift strange. He is skinny, so skinny, bones poking out in awkward places, everywhere. His limbs are much too long, like that of a baby animal going through growth – though the rest of him is not. His fur is short, like it was cut, cropped close to the skin, and his snout barely resembles what it should, close to his skull and lumped.

 

                Wrong.

 

                Everything about his appearance is wrong.

 

                She’s never seen a wolf like that.

 

                His eyes, small, beadier little things, flick to her, alarmed, and she doesn’t even have to ask if he’s seen himself yet. He can’t have, if he hadn’t been expecting that reaction. He turns and makes his way to the pond nearby, his gait graceful, moving in ways that is hard to comprehend with those unnatural legs. He spends barely a second looking at himself, before he rips himself from his reflection and tumbles backwards, shifting as he goes.

 

                If she wasn’t sure that he wasn’t aware of his wolf, his reaction would be proof enough.

 

                Once back, he looks completely like himself, but not. Naked, curled small in on himself, and trembling, he shakes beside the pond’s edge. He has eyes so wide it must be straining on his eyelids, and he is the most scared that she has seen him in years.

 

                Hands on the ground behind him, holding him up, digs into the Earth as he stares up at her with eyes of unshed tears. “Don’t tell –” he cuts himself off, but it doesn’t matter how he would have completed it. Don’t tell Dad, who would be so, so disappointed in something he had wished for in both of his children. Don’t tell Mom, who loves him, but is Alpha and has to think of her Pack. Don’t tell anyone.

 

                Don’t tell.

 

                Immediately, she is rushing forward and bundling him up into her arms, squeezing him in so close that it must surely be hard to breathe. She shakes her head fast, over and over until his hands come up to streak dirt all over her clothes as they grasp at her shoulders. She promises, promises she won’t tell, not a soul. She promises over and over until he starts crying, wracking sobs from his frame, choking on his own saliva and unable to pull in enough air to sob even harder. She promises through this, until he stops, until they both can’t make another sound.

 

                She’ll never tell anyone, _but_ – and her whole chest aches with this – this is something she’ll have to keep an eye on. Something is wrong, for his wolf to come out like that, and they both know that. But he still feels the same, he’s still just her brother, who’s worst deeds are borne of mischievousness and selfishness; thoughtlessness.

 

                She loves him. And he’s scared. But he’s still the same.

 

                (She never tells.)

 

* * *

 

 

                Now, with a new power, she takes him into the woods.

 

                He is not Peter.

 

                “I have been practicing,” she says, in a mimicry of that day, years previous. The words feel wrong in her throat, but she doesn’t let that stop them from leaving her mouth. Despite her practice, she feels vague flashes of insecurity, but when she attempts to stick her nose up at him, his kind eyes make her falter, as they always do.

 

                “Show me what you can do,” her husband tells her, and her heart thumps once, harder than the rest of her beats, but he couldn’t have known how close her words would be to her own, from a time long ago. Nobody could have known – she hasn’t told him and never will.

 

                Out in the woods, he watches her strip. She takes the time to set her clothes on a rock nearby, along the pond’s edge and he eyes her as she slows for time, but he never has even the slightest hint of impatience within him.

 

                She shifts.

 

                It’s a little freeing, in a different way than her full shift is. An Alpha form was supposed to be for power, for leadership. Less to show one’s inner self and more to inspire with one’s worth. She wonders how close it will be to her wolf. She wonders how different it will be.

 

                Once she has finished, all with a flare of her eyes, she looks up to see him watching her. His whole face has softened already, and he reaches forward to stroke between her ears, as he does to her in her wolf shift, but his arm lifts higher than she remembers. “Oh, Talia. You’re beautiful, as always. Strong and gorgeous.”

 

                She closes her eyes and lets his words and touch wash over her. Before, she’d had a deep urge to turn to the pond to see herself, but with him here, that feeling is quelled, gone. She doesn’t need to look, not right now. He can be enough eyes for her.

 

* * *

 

 

                Years later, at the pond's edge, deep in the woods, with an Alpha Spark he stole from his niece, who unwillingly inherited it from her mother, he shifts into his Alpha form.

 

                He looks nothing like a wolf at all.

**Author's Note:**

> and man, i'd always thought that peter had issues before the fire. just that... it didn't really help him any.


End file.
